


wheat, chaff

by la_dissonance



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Fix-It, Gen, Miscarriage, Suicidal Thoughts, but not permanently, none of them are, the valkyrie is not allowed to be dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 15:42:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4485235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_dissonance/pseuds/la_dissonance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Immortan Joe died in the end, but what if he had died one of the other 80,000 times a badass woman threatened his life? This is that fic. </p>
<p>(Or, 5 times Immortan Joe dies and everyone else lives.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	wheat, chaff

**Author's Note:**

> There are (non-graphic) references to past rape/abuse. A couple of characters have suicidal thoughts (sections 1 and 5, specifically). I started writing this as fix-it fic but it got pretty dark in places so please mind the tags. Basically nothing happens here that doesn't happen in canon, but the actual movie was pretty darn violent, so. Huge thanks to were_duck for all their encouragement and help making this into something that makes sense outside my head <3

0\. 

 

Things happen a certain way, and there's no going back. Even in a world with no rivers, time still has a current and a direction. Things happen and then other things happen, and what's done is done. 

But time is also like sand, a million grains drifting together to form the thing that happened, each of the million grains its own _what if_ , its own tiny universe of shifting instants and maybe sos. Shift one instant slightly to the left and the could-have-beens cascade into a new arrangement of the thing that happened as if the first thing was never there at all. 

Time is a current, but it can also drift. 

 

1.

 

If Miss Giddy pulls the trigger a second earlier, time cascades around the fixed point of fingerprint and gunmetal and drifts into an entirely new configuration of what happens next. If she pulls the trigger an instant earlier, Immortan Joe's eye's go wide, then his head transforms into a fine mist as the room fills with thunder. It leaves a sticky mess that would take six pairs of hands a week to fully wash away, but it's only Miss Giddy here now. 

The other five are far away, only growing farther with each moment that Immortan Joe fails to storm back through the halls bellowing the war cry. They fade into the distance with no one in pursuit, and are never seen nor heard from again. The buzzards pick off a few support vehicles and the war boys who cling to the sides of the rig; the sandstorm finishes the rest. 

They pass through the green place, and arrive at last into the open arms of the many mothers, dusty and whole. 

Miss Giddy, though, has not even begun cleaning the mess before Rictus runs in. She had taken three cartridges - the first for Immortan Joe, the second for safety, and a third they never talked about, even though they all helped her hide them away. It was part of the plan, her own part and the only way she could see this working, and she had lived long beyond her years, anyway. She uses the second cartridge on Rictus, and the third on the guard who comes running in after the noise, but there's nothing left for the fourth and the fifth and the sixth man who comes rushing in, nothing for all the imperators and lieutenants and the hordes of war boys below. 

An old woman is invisible, though. Even more so if she drops her shotgun and steps away from the broken bodies blocking the door. She's invisible if she slips out and away and down, out into the sun and into a throng of invisible people just like her. She can disappear completely, and live. 

 

2.

 

But if that's not what happens, if Miss Giddy's shot goes wide and Immortan Joe drags her along in hot pursuit of his treasures, pounding down the canyon floor after the war rig with his cars and tanks and army far behind, nothing that happens after is set in stone. 

When Angharad slips and falls and looks to be lost forever, maybe Cheedo surges forward and grabs the makeshift wheel. Furiosa and their silent passenger say they can't go back, but she won't take no for an answer, can't, and it cracks the shell of frozen inaction that's holding the others, until they're all pressed through the gap between the front seats, helping Cheedo swing the rig right around, grabbing guns, smacking the fool in the head when he tries to pluck their hands from the wheel. Maybe he saw some other girl go under the wheels, long ago, but this is what Cheedo saw: Angharad only hit her head and wrenched her shoulder as she fell, bounced once and lay perfectly still as the Immortan's rig roared above her. 

Cheedo storms out of the rig before it's even swung fully around, and they all tumble out after her, scrambling into a dead run. The fool grabs the bag of guns and presses weapons and ammo into empty hands as fast as he can, until they're all bristling with more instruments of death than a whole pack of slavers. 

They have Joe and his men surrounded before he even reaches Angharad's twisted body. Six shots to his chest, his neck, his head and knees, and he crumples as if the earth had opened up to swallow its mistake whole. 

A necessary killing. 

Cheedo and Capable run to Angharad's side while the others circle around to finish off the rest of the Immortan's men. Cheedo looks away. Together, they roll Angharad onto her side, check for broken bones and cuts that will fester. She has a knot on her head the size of a baby's fist and growing, but she's breathing strong and even. She will need much more help before she's whole again, but it's not as if they've never set bones before. Cheedo touches Angharad's warm cheek and folds to the ground as if gravity has suddenly doubled, tripled, the weight of all she almost lost pressing her down. Angharad's strong fingers close around her own, and she brings them to her lips. 

Behind her, the sounds of fighting continue for a time, then stop. Capable helps her gently lift Angharad to her feet, and they make their slow way over to where the others are standing in a wary half-circle around a crouched figure. 

In the center, Furiosa has a knife against Rictus's jugular. He doesn't look conscious, but they all have guns trained on him. Better safe than dead. 

"No killing," Angharad says, softly but not too soft to be heard in the tense quiet. 

"Is it even killing?" Dag spits, and Furiosa looks between them as if awaiting a command. 

"We could use him, probably," Toast says, and then the war parties glimmer in the distance and the decision is made for them. They gather Angharad up and climb into the rig. There's room enough for an out-of- breath Miss Giddy and a very confused war boy, so they bring them, too. 

Rictus they leave tied to the grill of Joe's car, his father's corpse laid out below him. Let this world they built decide what to do with the two of them.

The fool stays with the dead, this time. "They have my car," he says, when they ask. "I'll make my own way." If he does, they never know. They head east, and east, and east. When they meet Furiosa's people, it's not where or how they expected. Every woman is a stranger, and even though they're nothing like the sister and brother she holds close in faded memories, to Cheedo it feels like coming home.

One of the Vuvalini has a map from before. Things have changed, she says, but she shows them where they are, and shows them the sea. She looks into each of their faces, one at a time. 

"It is far," she says, "but we have never been stronger."

The others nod their assent. 

The first few days are hard. Nothing but flat, white salt as far as the eye can see. Dag goes blind from the sun. Toast builds Dag some glasses out of old beach glass one of the mothers has in her pack, and some for Angharad too, since her eyes are so light. She's riding in a sled, now, as her bones knit and her insides piece themselves back together after the baby she lost, but she'll need them once she starts riding. After a month, she does.

They measure time by the moon and navigate by the stars, always east. They pass stones piled high, and they pass poisoned places, and it's nothing but more salt for a long while. They get stuck in a storm once and lose almost half their water to the wind and the aftermath. They come up against ravines so deep they have to track south for days - weeks - to get around them. At the sun's height, they rest in the shade of lone mountains.

Eventually, one of the ravines is full of water. Trenches, the Keeper of the Seeds calls them. Trenches, and the ocean was full of them. They all had names. First in pairs, then all together, they climb down and find the water is fresh. It's crystal clear and so deep no one can see the bottom. There is no soil, but there are caves, and there can and will be paths between them, if they work hard enough. They settle there. 

 

3\. 

 

But maybe Cheedo doesn't reach for the wheel, and maybe they don't turn around. If they keep going straight ahead, Angharad lands on the hard ground and doesn't move until Immortan Joe's chalky hands hoist her up and lift her high. Her shoulder screams and her leg is engulfed in white hot pain as the men and their guns and their motors roar angry around her. Angharad holds her breath and thinks of nothing until her consciousness slips away. It's a useful skill to have. 

When she awakes she's on the road again, in the back of a car with a veil over her eyes and Miss Giddy's hands on her shoulder. It feels swollen now, and stiff, but it's back in the right place. Miss Giddy's voice soft in her ear, some time later: "A pain now, child. I'm sorry it went so wrong."

It would be easy to slip away again, to come back when it's all over, but there's been enough pain. She can't see while she's playing dead, but she can hear, and at the sound of Immortan Joe's voice, she lunges. Adrenaline fills her veins to bursting, fills her with a strength she's never been allowed, and the knife is in her hands before she knows it. With barely a thought, she drives the sharp, sharp blade up and in between two plates of the armor, and _twists_. 

No unnecessary killing, she had said and they had all agreed, but she never said anything about suffering. This is a man who caused her sisters to suffer, caused the world to suffer, and a world of suffering in return would not be enough for him. She had to be strong for the others, but for this, she can be as bitter as the bile that rises in her throat at the smell of him. His life is draining out of him and his hands can't find purchase. 

"Save me," he says to the mechanic. "Help," he says to Miss Giddy. They both just watch. 

"Witness this," Angharad says, and ends his life. 

There's an uproar. Angharad stands tall on a splinted leg, and proclaims herself the mother of the Immortan's next coming, holy vessel and regent to his chosen heir. She demands allegiance, and gets it. The war party turns into a funeral party, tracking back the way it came to set the fallen Immortan to rest. He was not worthy, she tells them when they ask. He doubted, and he had to fall, to pave the way for those even greater still to come. 

Angharad performs the rite, decked out in robes from another world. They are heavy and regal, and she feels cold as ice underneath them as she lights the final fire. She turns the water on as a last remembrance, and leaves it on. Great pipes pouring life into the sterile dust - a waste, an extravagance - but it's an extravagance she can't afford not to spend, now. Control the water and you control life itself. 

Quietly, she sets up a council. She doesn't call it that, but she surrounds herself with those she would trust with her own life, with the life of this place. There is no one Angharad trusts enough to send out into the wastes and send word to the ones she holds dear, not yet, but there is time. One by one, those who would support the old ways disappear, cast out into the wastes. If they pause to speak poisoned words into the ears of those who live below, they are not heard. No words are poisoned enough to hurt Angharad the Splendid, the one who gives life. 

A month later, she announces the birth of her child, a healthy baby girl. "We just have to outlast all of them," Angharad tells her council, "and then the next leader will be chosen by us all. It won't be long now." The balance tips slowly in their favor, and they wait. 

One day, a ragged man drives up to their gate. The platform is lowered, and he is brought up. He brings word of friends, a lover, a leader. By now they must be halfway to their deaths in the salt, but not so far gone that a war rig filled to the brim with guzzoline and water can't catch them in time. It sounds like hope. 

 

4.

 

If that's not what happens, though, if Angharad is lost and they carry on and then swing back around without her, maybe the Valkyrie's shot hits a fraction of an inch to the right. Anything could happen - it's a rough road, and the cars are swaying on their springs. 

If the Valkyrie's first shot hits slightly to the right, then maybe her second shot hits dead center, and the Immortan Joe slumps over his wheel immediately. Her next shot hits a tire, and the whole truck spirals to a halt as if in slow motion, end over end. The next vehicle is close, too close to brake in time. The Valkyrie gathers her mother up and runs. She doesn't stop until she reaches high ground, turns around and watches the flames engulf the cars as they pile up like dominoes, one after another. 

Her mother had given her dominoes, once, when she and the others were small. When there had been others, when they had called themselves the Valkyries and ran into the trees shooting imaginary arrows at imaginary men. Before it was just herself and Furiosa, and then just her alone. She took their name as her own that day, a remembrance. 

She tends to her mother's wounds - not serious, but scalp wounds always do bleed more than seems right - and together they head out to meet Furiosa. She finds them a mile away, back to back with the rest of the Vuvalini, in a pitched battle with the last of the stragglers. The Valkyrie takes a rifle and the high ground, and helps. The warlords are dead, but the war rages on until the last of their blind followers have followed them into death. It's dirty work, and long, but at the end of the day they're all still standing. 

Wreckage spills for miles on all sides, it seems. Afterwards, they pick through it, burning bodies and taking anything that could make itself useful. There's no rush, now that the war is gone. The Valkyrie has learned this over and over again - the war is never over, only gone for a time. If she can, she will do anything to keep the war far, far away from those she loves. 

In a battered shell of a car, they find two women - one old and covered in a thousand stories, the other young and near death. She is too pale, the rags around her soaked with blood, and although her eyes are open, she does not seem to see. They welcome them both with open arms, and the women who came with Furiosa weep. Joy, to see their friend again, and fear, that they might lose her so soon. 

"No", the quiet man says. The Valkyrie didn't expect him to stay with them through all this, but so far, he has. Maybe he's been waiting for this. He rolls up his sleeve and his fingers scrabble for a needle. 

"They didn't even sew her back up before they dumped us out of the truck," the one they call Giddy is saying. "I did what I could, she says, but she's lost a lot of blood." Someone produces a needle, then, and the man unravels a line and pumps life back into her while one of the mothers checks Giddy's stitches, checks for internal bleeding. There's none. What she gets now, she'll hold. Furiosa stands watch; the young woman's friends gather close to her. They hold her hand and stroke her hair and whisper happy memories, and chant her name like a prayer. 

The mothers only make the man stop after he goes a bit ashen in the face, but it's against his protests that he's a big person, he's got plenty to spare. Furiosa steps in and lays him down with a jacket under his head and says that if he's that intent on bleeding out for people he's just met, what he needs is rest and plenty of water so he can do it again that much sooner. There's the barest hint of a laugh in her voice. The Valkyrie feels it in her heart like a deep ache, something coming to life that she never thought would grow again. 

They ride at dawn, when Angharad opens her eyes and chides them for staying so long out in the open on her account. It was a wait they all needed, though. Sometimes time and space can do more than any amount of running and fighting. There's no one behind them, anyway, so they take their time picking out the best of all the cars that aren't burned up, and siphon off all the guzzoline they can from the ones not worth saving, and make their way lazy and safe around the mountains and all the way home. 

The Valkyrie spends her days with her cheek against Furiosa's neck, her chin on her shoulder and arms around her waist. They took so many cars, it almost seems silly to share one bike, but Furiosa never acts like it is. Nights, they spend under the stars, slowly unpacking all the words they never thought they'd get to say. 

"After all this time," Furiosa says once, and there's a dried up ocean of tears behind the words.

"I know," the Valkyrie says, as those seven thousand days open up behind them, a gaping chasm. Before it can swallow them both, Furiosa pulls her close, a strong arm around her waist and a solid warmth along her back, a perfect mirror to their dusty rides in the sunlight. She whispers a secret name into the Valkyrie's ear and her heart fills to the brim, spilling over. 

The Valkyrie kisses her then, turning in her embrace to cradle Furiosa's face in both hands, thumbs resting lightly on her dry cheeks. "I love you," she whispers when they part, foreheads resting together. Furiosa smiles in the starlight and kisses the Valkyrie soft at first and then harder, and suddenly the whole future rushes up to meet her, and she feels as if she could fly. 

After a week, they arrive.

The Valkyrie isn't sure what she expects when they get there, but a hero's welcome isn't one of her top guesses. Even the place itself is more than she dared imagine. There's air, and height, and _green_ the likes of which she never thought to see again. Tears leak down her face, and she looks into the faces around her, and sees she's not alone. Her heart swells as Furiosa is lifted on the shoulders of the crowd, and then she's lifted up too, and the crowd, and they're all soaring up into the future. 

 

5.

 

Or maybe, just maybe, everything happens exactly the way it does. They fight, and lose those dear to them, and Furiosa almost loses the world. She's almost angry at the fool who brings her back, at first, because she was there - the one great deed to make up for a lifetime of misdeeds, and a graceful exit - and now she's here again. The fight goes on. 

She returns to her hero's welcome. Everything happens just the way it does: the mothers turn the water on, and the people chant her name, and the fool fades away into the crowd as she's lifted up. Maybe it's a trap, or maybe it's a prison. Only one way to find out. 

On the first day, they smash skulls. The people from below would drink their fill at the waterfall and then charge through the Citadel itself, picking the gardens bare, battering down the doors and raiding the stores until nothing remains. Furiosa can't blame them; they're starving and this place deserves to be torn to the ground. But it's the only place they have, and it might be the only place they're ever going to get, and it has to last. 

Furiosa isn't afraid of mobs, but still she wishes Angharad were here. She can't bring herself to command, but she's able to redirect, nudge and channel all that energy some place that could use it. 

So they smash skulls. The place is covered in them - walls, doors, ceilings, all skulls. There are skulls on the clothes, and on every part of every vehicle. The riot doesn't die down until well into the night, after every skull has been destroyed. There are skulls on the people, too, on every last one of them, but those they can cover, rebuild, repair. Not the work for a riot. 

Also on the first day, they give out food. 

Toast and Capable and Cheedo and the Vuvalini whose names they learn later go up to the highest storehouse, where the food for the war boys is piled up. They fill basket after basket, and send them all down on a hook attached to a cable attached to a crane. Halfway through the long, long day, someone sends up a small child in the empty basket. Capable makes sure she eats, then tries to send her back down, but she won't go. They give her a basket of potatoes, and she spends the rest of the day helping. 

When Furiosa learns what they did while the mob smashed skulls, she feels shame. What does it say about a someone, that she can fight so hard and then all she can think to do is destroy?

 

+

 

But out of a million tiny universes of possibility, that one is vanishingly unlikely. 

What probably happens is that on the road, once they almost think all is lost, the Keeper of the Seeds pulls a gun from the bottom of her bag, unearths the one anti-seed that all the others are there to cancel out, and pops the Immortan Joe right in the back of the head. Her aim is true, bullet piercing through an accordion of vinyl and stale air to find its mark.

This time, no one is lost - they get lucky, or they're careful, or decisions just stack up in an ever so slightly altered arrangement that adds up to the difference between _life_ and _death_. The canyon walls collapse on their pursuers, and they ride the war rig right up to the citadel gates.

It's hard, in the beginning, and the first few days are almost impossible. They lose some of the gardens, and many of the cars, and most of the guzzoline. It takes a long time to pick up the pieces of what Immortan Joe and all his men left broken, for everyone to come together and find a better way. 

The Keeper starts a school. Children frighten her, but someone has to learn about the seeds, and mostly it's children who have the time and the will. When she's not busy pouring everything she knows into their hungry, strange little minds, she tends to her plants. 

Furiosa comes and goes, sometimes with their Valkyrie by her side, other times alone. The Keeper teaches her about growing things on long nights when the stars are too bright to let either of them sleep, even though she already taught her all of this, in another lifetime. This patient, restless woman makes a better student than the small confusing child ever did, anyway. 

Dag has her baby, and can't stand to look at its face. The rest of them give him a name and take him in, and he grows up with not one but many mothers, some so old they had their first children in a different world, some wise and some kind and some fierce. He grows up nothing like his father.

There are wars. There are always wars, when people want what isn't theirs to have. The mothers and sisters and children of the citadel protect what they've built, as fiercely as they ever did in the desert, and here their numbers are multiplied tenfold. 

They win.

Their numbers grow, and slowly, their allies outside the citadel grow too.

The trees that the Keeper planted with the children when she first came here are now knee-high in their buckets. It will be time for them to find a permanent home soon, although they will all miss the trees in their rooms, or the balconies or crowding the meadows on the citadel's heights. There are few patches of sunlight that don't have trees living in them, at this point. There wouldn't be any if the Keeper's children hadn't run out of things to use as buckets. 

Toast teaches herself how to build an irrigation system out of old car parts and passes the knowledge along to anyone else who will learn. Soon, in the ground between the spires of the citadel, the trees will take root. If all goes well - if their allies don't turn into war parties again and the storms don't come, they could have real crops. Some of them still remember when the whole world wasn't dust, when patchwork fields of gold or green would stretch as far as the eye could see. The Keeper doesn't see how there's room for that here, giving that not too long ago she could see into five different hostile territories without even climbing to the top of the highest tower, but things change. And they have water. Enough water for years and miles of crops, if they're the right ones, Toast says. 

In time, the green place returns.


End file.
